Tom Powers: Minnesota Twins' hopes tied to Bionic Rotation

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- It is their biggest hope and their biggest gamble. If the Twins show any improvement this season, it will be because of their new Bionic Rotation.

"Bionic Rotation? Yeah, I don't know if you can really beat that," Vance Worley said appreciatively. "Maybe Comeback Kids. But I don't think you can really beat 'bionic.' "

Well, four surgically repaired starting pitchers all coming on board at once. I kept thinking of the 1970s TV series, "The Six Million Dollar Man." Now, if you're reading this online via some sort of weird app in your shoe or something, you're probably too young to remember the show. But if you're reading this in the newspaper, you may recall the show and the cool intro:

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability ...''

Kyle Gibson and Mike Pelfrey are coming off Tommy John surgery. Scott Diamond had bone chips taken from near his elbow. Worley had a bone spur removed from his elbow. Meanwhile, Rich Harden is in the wings trying to come back from shoulder surgery. So that's four elbows, a shoulder and a partridge in a pear tree.

Only Kevin Correia comes to the Twins with original factory-installed equipment. So maybe we should change the title to something like "K.C. and the Bionics."

"It's early yet," Correia noted, tongue in cheek. "Maybe I'll have to come back from an injury."

OK, we won't take any chances. Bionic Rotation, it is.

"That's actually not bad," Diamond said. "But I like Comeback Kids.

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Bionic kind of sounds like we're all Power Rangers and we all morph together."

Sorry, you're overruled because several of the reconditioned pitchers are too old to be considered kids. And Bionic Rotation has a nice ring to it among aging Baby Boomers who remember the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin (Lee Majors) and, a bit later, the Bionic Woman, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), using their bionic body parts to beat up the bad guys.

By the way, "The Six Million Dollar Man," first aired in 1973, would be worth roughly $35 million today because of inflation. Six million barely even gets you Nick Punto anymore.

Worley, Diamond, Gibson and Pelfrey all have spots reserved. That's four-fifths of the rotation, with Correia being the other component. This is quite a leap of faith. What are the chances of all four coming back strong from surgery?

The entire season, and the future of the manager and coaching staff, hangs on the answer. If all four return to form, the Twins probably are looking at a 15- or 16-game improvement that gets them back to .500. That's huge. Remember that there are young, hard-throwing pitchers on the way.

But you can start subtracting from that victory total if one or more of these fellows fall by the wayside. Twins general manager Terry Ryan spent the winter trying to restock the farm system and cobble together a decent rotation. There wasn't much attention paid to the other positions.

If any of the newcomers can't make it, or wind up needing additional time, the team dips into the "B" pool. And the "B" pool basically is last year's rotation minus Diamond: Liam Hendriks, P.J. Walters, Cole De Vries and Sad Sam Deduno. That whole group was swept out of Target Field immediately after the last game of 2012, but not placed in the Dumpster -- just in case.

We'll probably end up with some sort of amalgamation of old and new because I just can't see the Twins going 4 for 4 on surgically repaired arms. The odds are astronomical.

Yet so far, the results are encouraging. Gibson and Pelfrey, with the two most serious surgeries, report no medical issues after two outings. Worley, who probably had the least serious procedure, also is reporting no problems. Diamond has yet to pitch, but says he is encouraged by his progress.

Maybe the Bionic Rotation will take the American League by storm. The only thing that bothers me is that I keep thinking back to a certain element of the original television show. As strong and as fast as the Six Million Dollar Man was, he had a serious flaw: His bionic parts tended to malfunction in extremely cold weather.